ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Jacqueline Graniel spent her whole childhood in Southern California assuming other families also lived paycheck to paycheck. Now, as she studies for both a medical degree and a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, she has found that some of her classmates avoid the stress of renting and dealing with landlords by simply buying houses, sometimes with help from their parents. That’s not an option for Graniel; she sends a portion of her stipend home to support her family.

Growing up with a single father, Graniel has been taking care of siblings since she was in elementary school, and she’s happy to help support the people she loves. But to suddenly be surrounded by students who have the luxury of focusing solely on school was jarring. “If I didn’t have a tight community, I would probably feel lost,” she said recently during lunch downtown with some of the people who make up that community, specifically other members of the Society for Advancement of Hispanic/Chicanos and Native Americans in Science, or SACNAS.

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A handful of her friends and classmates agreed. Marcos Nuñez was born in Guatemala and moved to California at age 5, where he grew up among other lower-income, Latino families who often looked out for each other. Everyone was always feeding everyone else or inviting people who needed a place to sleep to crash on an empty couch. As an undergraduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, he was close enough to family that his parents could swing by the dorms to drop off fresh lemons and avocados—a taste of home. Now, as a graduate student at Michigan, it’s hard for his family to understand why he felt the need to travel so far away for school, and he misses that safety net. At school, people keep to themselves more, and when they do invite him out, sometimes finances or other family obligations prevent him from accepting. A scholarship he earned that should have made life easier turned out to be difficult to count on because of the way the money was distributed. “It felt like I was being punished for being a smart, brown kid,” Nuñez said.

“Acknowledgement doesn’t make my college classes more livable.”

There’s a good reason students like Graniel and Nuñez feel like outliers at Michigan. A recent study by the Equality of Opportunity Project that was covered extensively by TheNew York Times found that the median family income of a student at the university is $154,000, the highest out of nearly 30 public colleges the report classified as highly selective. Fewer than 4 percent of students come from families in the bottom 20 percent income-wise. (For reference, the state’s median household income is around $50,000.) Often, though not always, lower-income students are students of color or the first in their families to attend school. Less than 5 percent of undergraduates in 2015 were black, and a similar number were Hispanic. The numbers aren’t much better at the graduate level. According to the university’s student paper, just 17 percent of students in 2016 were eligible for Pell grants.

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All of those not-great-on-paper numbers make for a day-to-day experience that isn’t always pleasant for students on campus who aren’t white and wealthy, said more than a dozen students during interviews here, and that’s especially true for students who identify as LGBT or who feel otherwise marginalized. And while the university has acknowledged the lack of socioeconomic and racial diversity on campus and embarked on a long-term plan to improve the numbers and campus climate, students say the school isn’t doing enough and that the pace of change is too slow. “Some schools, if you’re poor, you might as well not go,” said Victoria Johnson, a 21-year-old from a suburb just west of Detroit who is a member of a student-advocacy group called Students 4 Justice, which has clashed with the university over how the school responds to inequity and racism on campus.

“Acknowledgement doesn’t make my college classes more livable,” said Lakyrra Magee, who is also part of Students 4 Justice. Forcing broad change will be difficult. Last year, when she turned 19, Magee, who is African American, said she and some friends were turned away from a largely white fraternity party and directed toward a black fraternity down the street.

Robert Sellers knows these tensions well. He’s the school’s chief diversity officer, in charge of implementing a multiyear, $85 million plan that aims to make both the student and the faculty bodies more diverse and welcoming to people from all backgrounds. But three decades ago, he was a graduate student at Michigan protesting racism and inequity on campus and calling for more diversity. Back then, he said during an interview at his office in the school’s main administration building, there was no structure in place to address the concerns of students like him. Now, he argued, the school’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” plan creates a space for those demands to at least be heard.

Broadly, that plan was developed with the idea that different spaces on campus have different needs and challenges. So each department or unit on campus has been tasked with coming up with and implementing ideas that work specifically for them. “Solutions for microclimates” is how Sellers phrased it. Some departments have incorporated diversity training into the onboarding process for faculty—but others haven’t. Some student activists think that this framework lets too many people off the hook—like those who don’t prioritize diversity—and allows them to avoid engaging. But Sellers argues that requiring people who aren’t interested in participating—or who are openly hostile to the idea—“wouldn’t be particularly effective” and might negatively affect training for everyone else. Whatever is done, he said, will be too much for some and not enough for others.

“You learn more from people who bring different life experiences to the table.”

And in some ways, he argued, broadening the range of voices on campus has gotten more difficult since 2006, when Michigan voted to ban the use of race in admissions. That’s also around the time that the K-12 school system in Detroit went into steep decline. In response, the university has stepped up outreach to middle- and high-school students and their families across the state, and it has created a scholarship program for high-achieving low-income students, Sellers noted. The school is also one of the co-founders of the new American Talent Initiative, which was launched late last year to increase the number of low-income students at elite universities.

Mark Schlissel, the president of the University of Michigan, hailed those efforts over coffee on an unseasonably warm morning in Washington, D.C., recently. And while he acknowledged that there has been some pushback from students about how the diversity plan is structured, he said he “strongly believes” the microclimates structure will “distribute ownership.”

The challenges the university faces in increasing diversity are similar to struggles at other elite colleges. And, Schlissel said, they’re tied to what he sees as a public disinvestment in a common good. “You learn more from people who bring different life experiences to the table,” he said. But unless people buy into that idea, they’re not going to want to fund it. That goes for international students, too. Schlissel is concerned that the Trump administration’s new immigration order will signal to students abroad that they are not welcome, which he thinks could hurt not only research, but the mutual understanding and engagement that ultimately strengthen public safety. “If we give that up, other countries will embrace that to our detriment,” he said.

As the university president, Schlissel is fielding pushback from all sides—from some faculty and donors who think he’s moving too fast to overhaul one of the nation’s top research universities; from a faculty member and former faculty member who recently filed a lawsuit alleging that they’ve been the victims of racial discrimination and harassment (A university spokesman said in a statement, “We will vigorously defend the university against the lawsuit.”); from conservative students who thought he came across as anti-Trump at a post-election vigil (something he vehemently denied during our conversation); and from students who are members of groups like SACNAS and Students 4 Justice who want more socioeconomic and racial diversity but who have very different visions about how the school should approach the task.

Vidhya Aravind is one of the leaders of Students 4 Justice. The 29-year-old trans-woman of color completed her undergraduate degree in 2009 and returned as a graduate student. What the university frames as a balancing act between preserving freedom of speech and protecting students from all backgrounds, she sees as a failure to create safe spaces for students like her and to stop hateful speech and activity. “Everything they do is for their brand,” she said. “It just feels like settling.”

Graniel, with SACNAS, is frustrated, too. “The majority of boots on the ground come from the students,” she said, adding that only some students and faculty seem to care. “There are people who hear the word ‘diversity’ and roll their eyes,” she said. “It just feels like we’re talking to ourselves,” is how Nuñez put it. Carla Ramos, the president of the Michigan SACNAS chapter, thinks there has been more talk about diversity on campus over the last few years, but that even when the university creates resources, such as emergency funds for students who face unexpected financial challenges, they can be hard to find. And students are frustrated by what they see as slow progress toward a more diverse campus. “The question that keeps coming out is, ‘What’s next, what’s next?’” she said.

Schlissel insists he is sympathetic, but he thinks, in the long term, working for incremental buy-in from the broader community that diversity and equity are important will result in real change. “If you force someone to do something, they’ll find the least impactful way to do it,” he said. Gabrielle McFarland, a 19-year-old member of Students 4 Justice, summed up the challenge this way: “Teaching empathy to people who aren’t marginalized is so hard.”

This article is part of our Next America: Higher Education project, which is supported by grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation.

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

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The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”